US investigates China's access to RISC-V — open standard instruction set may become new site of US-China chip war
Reuters reports that the U.S. Department of Commerce is investigating the risks of China's access to the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) for processors, heeding calls from lawmakers.
RISC-V (pronounced risk-five) is an ISA, a software instruction standard that tells processors how to receive instructions (e.g. x86 and ARM). RISC-V's low complexity is easier to work with than x86, and is a fully open standard — unlike Arm, its primary competitor. While not popular in mainstream computing products, the standard has a high potential for most processor use cases, concerning U.S. lawmakers attempting to limit China's access to advanced computing power in the ongoing trade war over tech.
The RISC-V standard is a fully open standard, licensable by anyone, and is currently held by a Swiss trust to keep its open standard nature intact. But this has not stopped U.S. lawmakers from calling it a U.S.-based tool and declaring China's use of it to be wrong — and perhaps dangerous.
"The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) is abusing RISC-V to get around U.S. dominance of the intellectual property needed to design chips," said Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in his first attack on China's access to RISC-V back in October.
